Find out how to Use PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

Previous to iOS 16, if you could show a photograph picker for customers to decide on pictures from Picture library, you must depend on PHPickerViewController or the older UIImagePickerController of UIKit. It’s not troublesome to make use of it as you possibly can combine UIKit parts with UIViewControllerRepresentable. That stated, it will be nice if the SwiftUI framework comes with a local view for photograph picker.

In iOS 16, Apple lastly brings PhotosPicker to SwiftUI that it has the identical functionalities as its UIKit counterpart. In case your app will solely assist gadget operating iOS 16 or up, you need to use this new view for dealing with photograph picks.

Let’s see the way it works with some pattern code. Please observe that you could use Xcode 14 beta 4 to comply with this tutorial.

Utilizing PhotosPicker in SwiftUI

The PhotosPicker view is bundled within the PhotosUI framework. Earlier than utilizing it, you must first import the framework:

Subsequent, we declare a state variable to carry the chosen photograph:

It’s fairly straightforward to deliver up the pictures picker. Right here is the fundamental utilization of PhotosPicker:

You instantiate PhotosPicker by passing it a binding to the chosen merchandise and a photograph filter. Within the closure, you describe the looks of the button. With a couple of traces of code, Xcode ought to present you a button within the preview.

When you click on the button, it shows a Images picker for selecting photographs from the photograph library. While you select a photograph, the photograph picker routinely dismisses and the chosen photograph merchandise is saved within the selectedItem variable.

Filtering the Images

The matching parameter enables you to specify the photograph filter to use to the photograph library. Within the code above, we set its worth to .photographs to indicate photographs solely. If you wish to show each photographs and movies, set the worth of the parameter to the next:

The .photographs filter consists of all photographs within the person’s photograph library. What if you wish to exclude stay pictures from the picture set? You possibly can set the worth like this:

You utilize the .not filter to exclude Stay Images.

Dealing with the Picture Choice

As talked about earlier, the chosen photograph is routinely saved within the selectedItem variable, which has a sort of PhotoPickerItem. So, how can we load the photograph and show it on display?

First, we connect the onChange modifier to hearken to the replace of the selectedItem variable. Each time there’s a change, we name the loadTransferable methodology to load the asset knowledge.

Within the WWDC22 session (What’s new within the Images picker), Apple’s engineer confirmed us to specify the kind as Picture.self. That is to instruct loadTransferable to return an occasion of Picture. Nevertheless, I couldn’t make it work on Xcode 14 beta 4. This is the reason I used Information.self as an alternative. Later, we will convert the information into an UIImage object for displaying in an Picture view.

The selectedPhotoData variable is one other state variable that’s used to carry the information object:

To show the chosen picture in a picture view, we create an occasion of UIImage utilizing the picture knowledge after which go it to the Picture view:

That is the way you deal with the picture choice. To recap, we retrieve the picture knowledge when a person selects a picture from the built-in Images library. We save the picture knowledge to a state variable (i.e. selectedPhotoData). SwiftUI detects the worth change and triggers a UI replace to render the photograph on display.

Choosing A number of Images

The PhotosPicker view may assist a number of photograph choice. Let’s construct one other fast demo to see the way it works. Once more, we now have two state variables to carry the PhotosPickerItem objects and Information object. For the reason that person might choose a couple of pictures, each variables turn out to be an array:

To assist a number of photograph choice, the trick is to make use of one other initialization methodology of PhotosPicker:

This methodology has an extra parameter named maxSelection. We set the worth to 5, which suggests the person is allowed to assist as much as 5 pictures. On this case, we might seize a couple of pictures within the onChange closure. What we did is to load every of the photograph objects and add it to the information array (i.e. selectedPhotosData).

For this demo view, as an alternative of making a button on the centre of the display, we put the button within the navigation bar. Right here is the total code snippet:

When there’s any adjustments of the selectedPhotosData variable, SwiftUI will refresh the UI and show the pictures within the scroll view.

When you get pleasure from this text and wish to dive deeper into SwiftUI, you could try our Mastering SwiftUI e-book.